


No One

by halyandpear



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, F/M, One Shot, POV Arya Stark, Sad Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2018-12-25 14:54:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12038250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halyandpear/pseuds/halyandpear
Summary: Just a one shot of Arya's reaction to Jon and Sansa.





	No One

When she sees him for the first time, her face breaks out in the first true smile since her father was killed. He’s grown, and so has she, but when he musses her hair again and calls her ‘little sister’, it’s as though they’ve never been apart.

When she sees Bran’s sallow cheeks and broken legs her heart aches for him. His eyes are haunted -- dead. Jon says he’s been this way since his return. She and Bran had always been close; perhaps not as close as she was to Jon, but close all the same. The sort of closeness children tend to find when they’re of similar age. They used to go swimming together and play stick fighting -- he’d steal a practice sword from the training yard for her. At night, they’d be the last ones awake listening to Old Nan’s tales, hanging on to her every word with wide eyes.

It’s Sansa who has changed the most. She’s become even more beautiful. Arya wonders for the first time what hardships she’s endured. When Arya was nine she could never have believed anyone would harm a pretty maiden like Sansa; pain was for the ugly girls like her. That’s what she’d always believed. She could see from Sansa’s saddened eyes that this was not true. Jon tells her not to ask her about it. She can see they’ve grown close; they won back the castle together, after all. It makes her happy that Sansa has finally accepted him.  

 

* * *

 

 

Life at Winterfell isn’t happy, exactly; she doubts she’ll ever be truly happy again –- not whilst the memory of her father and her mother and Robb and Syrio and Yoren persist, but she is more content than she has been for a long time, especially now that she has Jon again. She doesn’t know if he understands quite what he is to her, to quite the extent she needs him. To see him is a relief from her pain. He looks so like their father.

She even gets to sleep in a featherbed now, and for the first time in years she doesn’t go to sleep hungry.

 

* * *

 

 

She walks past his room on the way to the training yard one day and his door’s ajar. He’s talking to a girl she can’t see. She observes him smile a beautiful, radiant smile and is vaguely wondering who the person he’s talking to is when she hears a sweet, tinkering laugh. She stills. She knows that laugh. And she looks at Jon’s face again and realises what’s happening. What has probably been happening for a long time. She thinks back to all the smiles, all the laughs and touches that seemed so innocent at the time. _Has it really taken you this long to work it out?_ Yes, yes it has. And now that she has worked it out she wishes she didn’t know. She doesn’t want to know. But she does; now she can _see_ it and there’s no turning back, no unseeing.

 

* * *

 

 

For months, she pretends not to notice anything, and they pretend that nothing is happening in return. Do they really think she doesn’t know? _They probably want to believe I don’t. An unspoken agreement. They don’t know I’m trained to see, to truly see, after all._ She thinks about leaving, just going away. Even after all the struggle to get back home, she considers it. But was Winterfell truly her home anymore? Home was Robb and Bran and Rickon, her mother and her father. Her mother and her father were dead. Robb and Rickon were _dead_. Bran may as well have been dead, for all the life he showed. Jory and Ser Rodrick and Maester Luwin -- dead. Why was everyone _dead, dead, dead, dead, dead??_

There was Jon, true, but now to look at Jon -- was so painful it hurt. She wonders why that is. Did she love him, as a woman loves a man? She thinks about it. No, she decides, her love for him was deep and strong and enduring, but never… _like that._ So why does it bother her? She doesn’t quite know. She doesn’t think she’d care if it were any other person, but why, _why,_ did it have to be Sansa? Beautiful, perfect Sansa, who she’d always been compared to; had always been dismissed in favour of, who her mother and everyone else had always loved more. And Jon had chosen her. Mayhaps she needn’t look for a further reason than that. Everyone else had always loved Sansa more, why wouldn’t Jon? Had she expected too much of him: to love her most of all, forever? _Me, Arya Horseface?_ Could she really have expected that of him? Forced him to endure that?

She begins to wonder. Had he been lying, when he called her pretty? Did he only ever stay with her because Sansa was mean to him? She brushes away the doubt: she doesn’t want to poison those memories, even if they were lies.

 _It just hurts._ The thought comes to her unbidden and unwelcome. _This_ is what hurts her? Not dead men, not training until exhaustion or crippling starvation, but _this?_ Perhaps she was weak after all.

 

* * *

 

 

When Jon and Sansa come to her one day and announce their betrothal, she feigns both her surprise and happiness. That night she makes up her mind.

By the morning, she has a small pack assembled. She thinks it may have been better -- easier -- to leave a note, but she can’t leave without saying a true goodbye to Jon, not again. She wakes him at first light, thankful that he is proper enough not to share a bed with Sansa yet, as she does not want to see her sister. She tells him she’s leaving. His eyes go wide, panicked. He asks why. Why, why, _why_? Why in seven hells would you ever want to leave Winterfell, leave _m_ e? She doesn’t tell him it’s because it hurts her heart to see him with Sansa, because then he won’t marry her, and she would have ruined yet another thing. Arya doesn’t want to destroy anything else. She wants Jon to be happy, because he deserves it more than anyone in the world. So, she tells him that she wants to go back to Braavos. She says she was happy there. _A lie. I’ve only ever been happy with you._ He gets angry. He tells her if she tries to go to Braavos he’ll set guards at her door. He says if she somehow escapes he’ll bring her _right home, Arya, and I'm not jesting._ He works himself into such a state that she’s forced to wrest a cloth infused with essence of Sweetsleep over his mouth. He's asleep almost immediately.

When he wakes she’ll be long gone, with a different face. She’ll never wear the face of Arya Stark again, she decides in that moment. She unsheathes Needle and places it on the bedside table next to him -- the last remnant of her life. If he thinks clearly when he wakes, he’ll know what it means when he sees that. But she doesn’t think so.

Jon will search for her. He’ll search the North first, and then Braavos. He won’t find her. He’ll cry and rage, but eventually he’ll let go. Like he did for Father, for Robb, for his wildling wife. And then he’ll be happy.

She doesn’t look back as she rides from Winterfell. She thinks with irony that now she has finally become that which she had tried and trained to be for so long. All it took was to lose him.

 _No one._  

**Author's Note:**

> I've never understood the appeal of Jon/Sansa myself, but that's just me, and a lot of other people seem to really enjoy it! I just think of Arya's reaction to the whole thing and this is what resulted. Let me know what you think!


End file.
